Web Development

Question

Hyperlinks

I am creating a website and my hyperlinks to documents will not open. I have tried both PDF and word documents to be sure. When I hyperlink to an email address or to another part of the website the hyperlink works fine.

I wish I had the perfect solution for you

Most of us stumble upon the solution I described, and the only explanation I can give you is a security feature within Windows Firewall. The Firewall will allow a response that originates from your browser.

But in this case, the browser isn't open - you are attempting to connect where you have not originated the request through the browser.

The alternative (disabling Windows Firewall) is obviously out of the question. It is possible that 3rd party Firewall software provides a workaround.

In the meantime, you should probably paste a text message to document recipients advising them to copy and paste the document URL into their browser windows.

Wow

Just for kicks I turned off my firewall and AV just to see ... still doesn't want to work. This is perplexing because almost every website has document hyperlinks and they just open right up. I wonder why mine aren't working?

Example please...

It would be useful if you could post an example of the html so that we could see how it's formed.

Is the page online so that others could have a look and test it...?When you hover over the link in your browser, does the url show as you would expect in the browser status bar?Have you got any javascript running on the anchor tag, perhaps it's stopping the link firing...

What happens?

When you click on the link does nothing happen or do you get a "document not found" error page?

If your server is Unix (or derivative) then you need to remember that the document path is likely to be case sensitive.

Also, if you have spaces in the document names, it may pay to change the spaces to hyphens or, if this is not desirable, insert %20 into the URL instead, eg [my document name.doc] becomes [my%20document%20name.doc]

best answer yet

I think phil is probably on the right track -- but, if what he says doesn't solve the problem, we need to actually see the code before we can provide much help, I think. If the site is online, please direct us to it so we can view the markup source and see what the links do when they fail to work properly for ourselves. Some of us do web development professionally, so we should be able to help quite a bit, but it's difficult to diagnose a problem like this based on what you're saying.

Permissions?

I would suggest you to check the access permissions for those documents on the server which hosts the files. Check the folders permissions as well, because the final file permission is a combination of the folder and file permission.

Perhaps you don't have permissions for the anonymous user. When you access the file, it works because is ?you?, but when somebody else tries from outside he might not have the right access to the files, or the path is restrictive?

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